[Owncloud] Re: GSoC Sync Client - Server Component

[Robin Appelman]

On Monday 20 June 2011 22:22:09 kunal wrote:
> Hi all,
> for the last few weeks my mentor (Riccardo) and I had been evaluating
> various server and client SDKs and components that we could use to
> implement synchronization.
> 
> Both of us and I am sure all of you'll would concur that we must use
> standards compliant technologies to implement the sync. So we have
> decided to use a SyncML (an OMA standard sync Protocol) compliant server
> and client infrastructure.
> 
> The Client component would be developed using the Funambol C++ SDK.
> For the Client to work , we must use a SyncML compliant server.
> We have two options here :
> 1. Mooha SyncML server
> 	Pros:
> 	1. Completely written in PHP
>         2. Uses MySQL as a backend
> Because of the above two points , it would integrate with ownCloud very
> well.
> 	Cons:
> 	1. Provides sync only for Contacts and Calendars.
> 	2. Relatively new project, in its early stages, only supports
> calendars, notes, contacts as of now.
> 	3. A very small developer community , 3 developers. hence new
>  feature requests and bug reports get resolved very slowly.
>     	4. While synchronizing with akunambol ( a SyncML client) the server
> behaves erratically. (Gives errors, even when the data has got
> synchronized to the database successfully).
> 
> 2. Funambol SyncML server:
>     Pros:
>     1. Very Mature, version 10 (currently).
>     2. Very large developer community and a large contributor community.
>     3. Supports a lot of Synchronization types like Contacts, Calendar,
>  Files, E-mail etc.
>     4. Has a very mature Client SDK (in C++ and Java).
> 
> I would like to point out that Funambol has a lot of mobile clients
> (android , iphone, blackberry) which make the solution very widely
> adoptable and convenient. These are just sync clients and do not clash
> with Bartek's work.
> 
> (These clients would work with any syncML compliant server , including
> Mooha. But they are much more tested with Funambol).
> 
>     Cons:
>     1. The Server is written in Java. So the integration with the
> existing infrastructure would be slightly more time consuming as
> compared to Mooha.
>     2. Tomcat takes up around 40 to 50MB of RAM . Though most VPS
> providers provide much more than this but this leaves slightly lesser
> RAM for other apps of owncloud.
> 
> I personally would want to use Funambol for the server but before
> starting anything I would like to take the consent of the community
> members.
> 
> Please do share your comments / suggestions.

While funambol is certainly a better server, I would hate to see a dependency 
on java for the hosting.

In the current state mooha doesn't provide what we need but it's at least a 
base to work with.

 - Robin Appelman
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